“If I had to guess that this virus started spreading somewhere in September, October in Wuhan,” Redfield told Sanjay Gupta for a CNN special report.
“It’s my own opinion,” he added. “This is just an opinion. I am allowed to have opinions now. ”
The former CDC director went on to say that he believed COVID-19 had emerged from a lab in China, a theory one World Health Organization official called “extremely unlikely.”
“It’s not uncommon for respiratory pathogens that you work on in a lab to infect a lab worker,” Redfield told CNN.
Redfield added that he didn’t think it was “biological logic” that the virus could spread so easily between humans if it was originally from an animal, saying: “I don’t think it comes from a bat to a human. “
“Science will eventually understand,” he added.
Part of Redfield’s interview, including his beliefs the virus came from a Chinese lab, aired Friday before the special report.
The government in Wuhan, China first reported cases of pneumonia of unknown cause on New Year’s Eve 2019 before officials identified the novel coronavirus.
The United States first confirmed a case of COVID-19 on January 20 in Washington state, and travel was banned from China 11 days later.
